|
|
| There are two kinds of people who
| without sufficient vigour
| or depth of feeling to raise them to the height of true poetry,
| still are driven by a strange intellectual restlessness to
| express such slender emotion as they have in verse. It
| would be too harsh to accuse them of simply yielding to a
| petty and unreasonable vanity. There are foolish lads and
| silly maidens, it is true, who write, and even publish,
| nonsense out of sheer conceit. But there are a good many
| minor poets who do not compose nonsense, and yet do not
| compose poetry either. They look at life through their
| feelings, and so far are of the poetic temper, but from want
| either of culture or favouring circumstances, or force and
| depth of character, they never succeed in getting off the
| ground. The last is probably the secret of nine failures out
| of ten, not only in poetry, but in every other form of literary
| enterprise. Of the verse-writers who, for lack of vigour, fail
| to rise above the most undeniable mediocrity, some have
| taken to composition out of a strong natural proclivity, and
| others by the force of acquired ideas stimulating a
| temperament that was fairly sensitive to begin with. Of
| these two sorts of mediocre poetry the two volumes of
| verses before us are very fair examples. Mr. Bradbury, as
| a page in his book informs us, is self-taught, and has risen
| from the ranks. Mrs. Kemble’s mere name is a sufficient
| warranty that she is familiar with cultivated and artistic
| traditions. In both writers there is more or less of sincerity
| ~~ or, as poetical critics generally call it, unconsciousness
| ~~ of genuine feeling, and of a power of rhythmical
| expression. The feeling is not transparently artificial and
| simulated, as it always is with the sort of youths who used
| to imitate Lord Byron, and who now imitate sometimes
| Shelley and sometimes Mr. Tennyson, according to their
| bent. But in neither volume will the lover of poetry ~~ that is,
| either of deep thought strongly coloured with emotion, or
| else of deep feeling vigorously expressed and adorned
| with the products of imagination stirred by feeling ~~ find
| much to give him pleasure. For, in spite of a crude notion to
| the contrary ~~ so fallacious that it would be a wonder how
| it ever got a footing, if it were not that the crudest notions
| about art are precisely those which meet with the readiest
| and widest acceptance ~~ a keen poetic sensibility is no
| measure of the power of poetic expression, or of the art of
| evoking sympathy in the minds of others who are equally
| or more sensitive.

“The poet is born,”

we know,
| but not everyone that is thus
| constitutionally endowed with the poetic temper can lay
| claim to an intuitive knowledge of the poetic art. To
| succeed here, he must have a vigour, a concentration, a
| faculty of wide observing, which a poet, like the rest of us,
| can only acquire if at all by practice and industry. However,
| as neither Mrs. Kemble nor Mr. Bradbury is likely to claim
| seriously a place among the half-dozen giants who divide
| among them the great poetic supremacy, it is scarcely
| worth while, perhaps even scarcely just, to enter too far
| into the first principles of creative genius. Though there are
| certainly a great many persons of far profounder sensibility
| than either of our present versifiers who never composed a
| stanza in their lives, still the fact of possessing an
| inclination to write verses at all takes anybody out of the
| deadly dry and commonplace class. But there is a
| commonplace in sensibility. Most people see the sea break
|

“on its cold grey stones,”

and

“the long light
| shake across the lakes,”

without having their pulse
| stirred, or having a single tender or graceful or pathetic
| association suggested. But, even of those to whom these
| sights really give a degree of imaginative pleasure, the
| majority are only alive to that pleasure in a very
| commonplace way. The images that are suggested, and
| the associations that are called up, do not ascend into the
| loftier and more remote recesses of passion or feeling.
| Either Mrs. Kemble’s or Mr. Bradbury’s verses illustrate
| equally well this kind of incapacity.
| For instance, under the title of “The Poetry of Earth,” Mr.
| Bradbury writes a description of a pleasant day in the
| country when all nature seems to simile:~~
|
| This is very neat and very true, and there are two more
| stanzas in the same style; but where is the poetry of earth?
| Nearly all Mr. Bradbury’s pieces exhibit the same thin
| sensuousness. He is always inviting summer to come
| again with

“green, green leaves,”

or begging
| some maiden to stay with him in the dell when

“the
| white moon floods the skies,”

or thinking little
| superficial commonplace thoughts about our mortal lot on
| bridges at midnight, or in

“twilight reveries,”

while
| the number of distracting maidens, with every variety of
| hair and complexion, is positively countless. Some of the
| love songs are graceful enough, but very, very thin. When
| the poet ceases for a moment, now and then, from these or
| else from simple but pretty descriptions of natural objects,
| he becomes but the echo of a living poet, whose influence
| at the present day it would require a stronger originality
| than Mr. Bradbury’s to enable any versifier to resist. We
| know pretty nearly all that is going to be said in “A
| Fragment,” or anything else which opens thus: ~
| In order to compare the poet with the poetess, we shall do
| well to select a gloomy subject, for gloom appears to be
| the favourite medium through which Mrs. Kemble surveys
| life and things in general. Mr. Bradbury, with his Ada and
| Lady Gertrude and Lady Alice, and we know not how many
| more, is naturally not often in a melancholy mood. On one
| occasion, however, he seems to have been constrained to
| write some verses “In Sorrow”: ~~
| And so on. One instantly detects the want of momentum
| and concentrated force. This is just the sort of sorrow
| which a person of rather more than ordinary sensibility
| might feel in a general kind of way; but there is no size nor
| depth about it, such as might touch all mankind. Compare
| it, for example, with Burn’s fine ode entitled
| “Despondency.” Compare the cry ~~ with talk
| about preferring to be the humblest flower that grows, and
| the like. We immediately detect the measure of our
| mediocre poet’s thinness. Mrs. Kemble, as we have said, is
| a poetess of acquired ideas, and her verses therefore have
| an air of being more artificial. Hence, too, her partiality for
| the sonnet. There is no sign in her volume that she has
| more depth of feeling than Mr. Bradbury, but her verses
| serve to show how far cultivation may help to supply the
| lack of natural force and pliancy. For example: ~~
| There is not much superiority of thought here over Mr.
| Bradbury’s lines “In Sorrow,” but the varnish is very
| different, and makes the sonnet far the more effective of
| the two pieces. Very often the varnish is too strong for the
| body and colour, only even in this case cultivation tells
| enormously. Perhaps to this very cultivation, given to a
| temperament only moderately poetic, must be ascribed
| Mrs. Kemble’s chief defect ~~ an absence of anything like
| buoyancy. It is hard to illustrate this without lengthier
| quotations than the reader would care to have to meditate
| upon. But any dozen lines, selected almost at random, are
| enough to show what we mean. Here are some verses
| entitle “A Wish.”
|
| The thought here is so very much on the surface that
| vividness and freshness in the setting are the only things
| that could impart any sort of worth to it. But Mrs. Kemble
| has not the art of putting this spirit of movement into her
| verse. She mistakes sombreness for pathos, and
| heaviness for force. Her verses are very polished, but we
| nowhere feel the airy, buoyant tread of the poet. It is not
| merely that she almost invariably takes the gloomy side of
| life. Circumstances might give this tinge to a profoundly
| poetic nature. But there is a fatal want of glow and fervour.
| On the whole, like all other mediocre verses, these two
| volumes confirm the rule that no poems are worth reading
| except the best ~~ best, that is, each after its kind ~~ and
| this is especially true of lyrics.